While all the niceties are in place for gossipy titbits in the English village of King’s Abbot, where Roger Ackroyd lives, you will wish for more of Gertrude Ackroyd (Louise Saint Claire) with her over-the-top personality as she empties her whisky into a teacup and pretends, with fiery hair, nonchalance.
This story has a weight that cannot be told with a clean chronology. It’s about love and loss and big promises which are devastating and seismic to keep. It’s about holding on to the things that matter and the memories of love on a light tower in a music festival.
The question of a baby is answered severally as the play unfolds. It’s an answer concerning life, the universe and everything, rather than being about The Right Thing to Do at this time in a relationship. ‘Lungs’ takes us right through life’s trajectory, and it’s agonisingly relatable, whatever your age.
The production is delightful. It offers the now-57-year-old musical levity. As it opens, the lighting is rich with nuance. It feels like you’re gazing at a tableau of Rembrandt’s 1635 Belshazzar’s Feast not only for its colouration, but also in the evoked debauchery, teetering on the edge of biblical taboo.
In ‘Black Coffee’, everything, from a complete colour wheel of deadliest poison, to the toby jug in the room, to the sub-plot of secret plans for a bomb, not to forget the costumes and pin curls of the era, is perfectly handled. This is a well-made play at its best.
In ‘Thrill Me’, lighting in tandem with language and movement achieves greatness, lifting the spectacle to a sinister monochrome in the face of the greatest sin one human being can perpetrate against another. Balance in the performers’ movements and the story’s nuances, makes it satisfying on eye, ear and mind.
CHILDREN’S THEATRE REVIEW: ALICE IN WONDERLAND. TAKING A HEAVILY-detailed Victorian foray into a world conditioned by what we would in today’s times call surreal and packing it into one hour for a predominantly contemporary childcentric audience, is one challenge. Arranging it for a cast of but four performers […]
IT WAS A show that posed cheeky questions at well-established values, blew smoke in the face of modesty and even cocked a snoot at narrative flow. And this was in 1973, when the Rocky Horror Show first saw light of day. This madcap tale of forbidden pleasures and […]
AGEING IS A funny thing. Sure, it’s about vanity and keeping up appearances; it’s about reining in the metabolism and trying not to count the wrinkles, but it’s also about the clarity to say ‘no’ to things that you hate but would have been too polite to refuse […]
A MAN SITS on a chair on a small rug in the centre of a big stage. There is a little footstool on which he rests one foot. His body embraces a guitar in the manner of Spanish practitioners for hundreds of years. This is James Grace, arguably […]
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